LB's Rambles (Free subscription) | 09/29/2008
This week's podcast on "Classic Mysteries" is a review of "The Mystery of the Yellow Room," by the French author, Gaston Leroux, who also wrote "The Phantom of the Opera." In John Dickson Carr's famous "Locked Room lecture" in "The...
The Rap Sheet (Free subscription) | 08/29/2008
(Editor’s note: This is the 19th installment of our ongoing Friday blog series highlighting great but forgotten books--and the first of two posts today featuring locked-room mysteries. Our first selection comes from prolific British novelist Edward Marston (aka Keith Miles), perhaps best known for his Nicholas Bracewell Elizabethan mysteries, but more recently the creator of a series about mid-
LB's Rambles (Free subscription) | 08/18/2008
John Dickson Carr was the undisputed master of the locked room/impossible crime puzzle, and "The Crooked Hinge" is one of his best. It's the subject of this week's Classic Mysteries podcast, which you can listen to here. More details on...
EvolutionBlog (Free subscription) | 07/15/2008
For Part One, go here. Let us return now to the weighty topic of great locked room mysteries. In Part One I focused on the works of John Dickson Carr, who is certainly a central figure in the history of the genre. There are plenty of other works to be acknowledged, however, and we turn to that subject now. This will certainly not be anything like an exhaustive list, which would be impossible in any...
Euro Crime (Free subscription) | 04/20/2008
I prefer this list to the one in The Telegraph a while back. Links on the author's name take you to the Times's page about the author (which gives a suggestion as to which book to try); bibliographies are linked to their Euro Crime page: 1. Patricia Highsmith 2. Georges Simenon - Bibliography 3. Agatha Christie - Bibliography 4. Raymond Chandler 5. Elmore Leonard 6. Arthur Conan Doyle - Bibliography...
Bookgasm (Free subscription) | 04/01/2008
All the news that’s fit to capsulize! GET ‘LOST’ Leisure Books has reissued Jack Ketchum’s 2001 novel THE LOST as a special tie-in edition to coincide with the new movie based on it. The movie is written and directed by Chris Sivertson (I KNOW WHO KILLED ME), and features Ketchum in a small role. AND GET ‘LOST’ [...]
LB's Rambles (Free subscription) | 03/03/2008
The Mystery Guild has released a new, book-club-only, anthology called "Locked Rooms," featuring three novels by the undisputed master in the field, John Dickson Carr. It includes his masterpiece, "The Three Coffins," plus two other books: "To Wake the Dead,"...
Bibliobibuli (Free subscription) | 02/24/2008
The Sunday Telegraph has a list of the top 50 authors of crime fiction selected by their staff. It also comes with reading suggestions which I've listed below : GK Chesterton - The Complete Father Brown (1986) Arthur Conan Doyle - The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) Edgar Allan Poe - The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841) Ed McBain - King's Ransom (2003) Kyril Bonfiglioli - The Mortdecai Trilogy (1991)...
Chris Well: Learning Curve (Free subscription) | 02/07/2008
Lately, some have asked the definition of "cozy mystery" -- especially as differentiated from other kinds of mysteries. The folks who host the annual Malice Domestic convention define the subgenre as "mysteries which contain no explicit sex or excessive gore or violence; and usually (but are not limited to) featuring an amateur detective, a confined setting, and characters who know one another." According...
The Rap Sheet (Free subscription) | 02/02/2008
After a not quite fourth-month sabbatical from blogging, Mystery Scene co-publisher Brian Skupin finally dusts off Bookflings in order to examine a pair of self-published mysteries--one, an unsuccessful homage to John Dickson Carr, the other a collection of typo-ridden tales ostensibly about Sherlock Holmes’ time living under an alias in Manhattan. You can find his whole examination here.
nichtszusagen (Free subscription) | 06/07/2007
Note: scroll down for the ThursdayThirteen. Booking Through Thursday Encore Almost everyone can name at least one author that you would love just ONE more book from. Either because they're dead, not being published any more, not writing more, not producing new work for whatever reason . . . or they've aged and aren't writing to their old standards any more . . . For whatever reason, there
The Reading Diary of John Dupuis (Free subscription) | 03/07/2007
What do you care what I read in 1988? Nothing, of course, but I do. As I get older (I was 20 in 1983 when I started keeping track of the books I read) I find myself more and more in the position of looking at a stack of books on my shelves by, say, Cornell Woolrich and they all have the word "Black" in the title. I know I've read a couple but I can't remember which ones. Fortunately, I've been maintaining...
The Rap Sheet (Free subscription) | 02/21/2007
Anyone familiar with The Rap Sheet knows my fondness for vintage paperback fronts, especially those that Independent Crime’s Nathan Cain might define as “book cover porn.” I find the squeamishness of modern U.S. readers toward provocative novel jackets ludicrous, especially when they’re hit through every other media by sexy imagery (see this new ad campaign for PETA, as an example), and when they
Vorpal Blade Online (Free subscription) | 02/20/2007
Collecting Dell Mapbacks Between 1942 and 1962 (according to William H. Lyles, Putting Dell on the Map ) Dell Publishing Company put out 2,168 paperbacks. Their first (Dell #1) was Philip Ketchum's Death in the Library The back cover sported an eye peeking through a keyhole, and the blurb: This is a DELL BOOK presenting a new exciting Mystery Series selected by the Editors of America's Foremost Detective...
